Bill Gates' obsession with all things faecal continued apace on Tuesday as the billionaire philanthropist took to a Beijing stage armed only with a fierce determination to improve global sanitation. And a jar of poo.

The stunt may remind some of the 1993 episode of the BBC current affairs quiz show, Have I Got News For You, where a last-minute cancellation by then Member of the UK Parliament Roy Hattersley led to the unfortunate Honourable gentleman being replaced by a tub of lard.

We can certainly think of a number of people with whom Gates has shared a stage over the years that could be compared to a jar of excrement with very little imagination.

The stunt, of course, was to underline the very worthy need to deal with raw human waste. Failure to do so can cause diseases not limited to dysentery and cholera, which kill many thousands of people every year. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has flushed $200m over seven years into loo research, reckons that 4.5 billion people do not have safe access to safe sanitation.

In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.